A Guide to Selling Your Home

Sometimes selling your home is just as exciting as buying it as this marks a new chapter in your life. To get that new chapter off to the best possible start, you want to be making as much for your old home as possible. Here we’ve rounded up some of our best tips for selling your home.

Estate Agent or Privately?

One of the first things you’ll need to consider when you decide to sell your home is whether you want to sell through an estate agent or privately. Each option has its pros and cons, and every seller will have different needs, so it’s essential to take the time to research your options thoroughly.

If you decide to use an estate agent, then there are a few things you’ll need to find out beforehand: What type of property do they specialise in? How much do they charge? What is their reputation like?

Most estate agents will specialise in a specific type of home, so make sure you are using an agent that has at least some experience in selling your type of property. Also, consider the fees you’ll have to pay. Estate agents can take anywhere between <1%-3.5% of your final sales costs, as well as on occasion taking a fee for advertising and preparations etc.

When selling your home privately, the critical difference is that you won’t have to pay a hefty fee to the agents. The majority of costs are fees when it comes to selling a property comes from estate agent fees. You will also be responsible for the listing and advertising of your property.

Deciding a Price

The first thing to know about prices when it comes to selling the property is that ‘list price’ and ‘sales price’ are not the same thing. Always choose your sales price first as this will likely not be the same as your list price. If you are careful when choosing your sales price, then you can use current market conditions to figure out how to choose your list price.

Don’t overprice your house as the property will lose some of its ‘fresh’ appeal after its first two to three weeks of showings. On the flip side, don’t worry about under-pricing your house as homes that have been priced under current market value will likely often receive multiple offers.

It would also be worthwhile to pull comparable listings and sales in both your area and the area directly surrounding your property as this will give you an indication of average house prices for the area.

Preparing Your House for Viewings

Getting your house ready to view is an essential part of your sale, and there are a lot of home improvement guides online that you can use to see how to add some value to your home before selling it. Start with the simple and pretty obvious things.

Tidy up your gardens and make the front of your property looks nice. After all, it’s the first thing that potential buyers will see when they show up to view the property.

The same goes for the inside of your home. Don’t spend a fortune redecorating every room, but make sure it’s clean and tidy at the very least. For example, don’t have loose carpets, wallpaper hanging off the walls or broken fixtures and appliances. The viewers want to be able to imagine themselves living in the home, which they won’t do if the property isn’t up to standard!

Offers – Accept, Reject or Bargain?

Once you’re in a position where you’ve had an offer on your property you’re almost at the end of the process, however, make sure you’re considering all your options. Just because you got an offer, doesn’t mean you need to accept it.

Initial offers will likely not match the exact price you’ve listed your property for. In fact, 9 out of 10 first offers will be lower than your asking price. That being said, most buyers don't expect this offer to be accepted but will knock 5-10% off the asking price to gauge how you respond to the offer.

In these cases, it would be useful to try and bargain a little to see if you and the buyer can meet in the middle with both offering a little compromise. If the buyer isn’t willing to budge at all ten, your best bet is to simply just rejecting the offer.

The ideal position you want to be in at this point is to have multiple buyers vying for your property with offers. When this happens, not only do you have your pick of offers, but you will likely be able to play the offers against each other to get the best possible price for your house.

Once you’ve got an offer accepted all that’s left is to sign the papers, finalise the contracts and you’ve sold your successfully home!